Nick Bostrom reasoned that if any civilisation might feasibly produce an 'ancestor simulation', we're almost certainly living in a simulated world. Rizwan Virk explains why reaching this simulation point is no longer a fantasy, and why video games might offer the best description of reality.
While most people first considered the idea that we may be living inside a computer simulation after seeing The Matrix - the blockbuster movie which came out in 1999 - it is really the modern version of an old argument that the world around us isn’t the “real world”. Versions of this argument have ranged from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Descartes dreams about an “evil demon” that was deceiving him, and different variations have played a part in almost every major religious tradition.
The “new” element that has brought simulation theory to the forefront, is the development of computation. Perhaps one of the first modern incarnations of this idea came from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (whose stories, incidentally, served as inspiration for The Matrix). He declared at the Metz sci-fi conference in 1977 that “we are living in a computer programmed reality”. Dick’s speech was looked on with eyebrows raised, almost as if he’d gone mad.
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Fast forward a quarter century or more, and suddenly this idea is being taken seriously by everyone from technology moguls like Elon Musk, physicists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and philosophers like Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, whose landmark 2003 paper, Are You Living in A Computer Simulation, helped ignite the current wave of interest.
What happened in the intervening years? In short, video games happened.
In 1977, when Dick made his proclamation, video games were in their infancy, and coincidentally this was the year that Atari released the 2600 VCS. It wasn’t until the early 1980s when video games went from a novelty to something that “everyone had” in their home. In fact, the Atari VCS, complete with games like Space Invaders and Pacman, were my introduction to video games. If you were to ask anyone at the time if we could render all of the pixels in a three-dimensional depiction of the world, the answer would have been that it wasn’t possible: there are just too many pixels and not enough computing power.
Today, reaching the Simulation Point by creating a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the physical world doesn’t seem that far off.
In the intervening years, not only has computing power grown significantly (thanks to Moore’s law of processor speed doubling every 18 months), but the history of computing has been intertwined with the history of video games, which always required optimizations to get the best performance out of the machine. GPU’s, or Graphics Processing Units, were created to make rendering faster, and 3D Modeling, texturing and most importantly, conditional rendering, have all played important roles in moving us closer to the “Simulation Point”, a theoretical point at which we can build a video game that is indistinguishable from physical reality, like that depicted in The Matrix.
Today, video games have advanced apace to the point where rendering a three dimensional world with millions of online players concurrently is now possible, as shown by games such as World of Warcraft and Fortnite. In fact, the world’s largest music concert was held on Fortnite, with over 1 million players attending concurrently.
8th July 2020
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